3 Stories, 8 Songs

Crème Brûlée, Good Science, Ukraine, and a Place by the Sea

“Looks Like Snow.” Painting by Alanna S. Graboyes at ASGraboyesArt.com.

Stories and music for a quiet Sunday: “The Chuck Yeager of Crème Brûlée,” “For a Saner World, Data, Theory, and Humility” “A Year of War / Год войны / Рік війни.” And in the Lagniappe section, the eight-song “Rehoboth Pastorale.”

The Chuck Yeager of Crème Brûlée

My friend Steve Clark passed away last week, after a long and courageous battle with cancer. I could tell you about his humble upbringing, his sprawling intelligence, his professional accomplishments, his musical talent, his multitudinous acts of kindness, his other-worldly sense of humor, or his theatrical conversational style. But I think I’ll just tell you about his greatest achievement—piloting the first crème brûlée in human history to break the sound barrier.

Steve came from Central Pennsylvania, where haute cuisine goes no farther than shoofly pie. Somehow, though, long before the proliferation of TV chefs, Steve became obsessed with fine dining and developed world-class cooking skills.

Mid-career, he studied for a masters in health administration, in a mostly online program whose students were scattered across the United States. During the on-campus session in the winter of 1995-1996, Steve invited his entire class and others over for a Michelin-starred meal. (My wife and I were invited, leading to my enrollment in the same program and, later, teaching in it for 18 years.)

Cruel Nature, however, selected that day for a paralyzing blizzard. Steve, unwilling to abandon a near-complete dinner for 50 or so, persuaded the faculty to organize a military-grade convoy of heavy-duty university vehicles to transport the guests 20 miles or so from their hotel to his home.

The food was spectacular, though with each course, Steve fervently advised us that whatever we were now eating would pale beside the crème brûlée that would conclude the meal. Anticipation began to consume the diners. But when dessert time arrived, out came pleasant little parfait glasses with vanilla ice cream, topped with dollops of amorphous custard. Where, I asked an insider, was the fabled crème brûlée? The response was suddenly widened eyes and a small, but violent, shake of the head—a clear imperative to drop the subject posthaste.

After the meal, I asked her what that was all about. I was taken to a distant precinct of the house for the following explanation:

When Steve removed the crème brûlée from the oven, he was horrified to discover that the baking shelf had developed a slight tilt. Only half the dish was brûlée, with the other an anemic crème. Enraged, he set out to reverse this blasphemy. He hurriedly straightened the tilting shelf, remelted the caramelized top with a blow torch, and placed the confection back in the oven to re-form. The repair was perfect, except that the assemblage was now far too hot to serve anytime soon. “No matter,” he thought. “Mother Nature will now make amends for her insolence.”

Clad in oven mitts, he carefully carried the renascent crème brûlée out onto the frozen wasteland of his sprawling back deck, where the brutal cold would soon chill the dessert to servability. With the care one might afford a newborn child, he placed the pan in a snowdrift. Ominously, though, a serpentine hissing began issuing forth the moment the scorching pan met the icy sheet.

Suddenly, a now-steam-powered pan lurched forth, hydroplaning across the deck, weaving between tables, chairs, and grill, with Steve chasing it—in slow motion, as if in a nightmare. As he struggled to catch up with the accelerating comestible, afterburners kicked in, and a thunderous boom was heard as the dessert passed Mach One. By some miracle of thread-the-needle probability, the pan vaulted straight through the narrow gateway that led to an endless set of stairs leading to the frozen lawn, miles below. For perhaps 20 minutes (or so it seemed), the dish went bang!-bang!-bang!-bang!-bang!-bang!-bang! down the stairs, with Steve in desperate pursuit. When it reached the final step, Murphy’s Law serenely ruling the day, the pan flipped over, and the crème brûlée deconstructed itself across a broad expanse of wintry landscape.

In quietly muttering rage and resignation, Steve took a large serving spoon, scooped up whatever viscera of the late dessert’s mortal coil he could gather. That sad recovery mission provided the tasty, but mysterious dollops atop our ice cream. Steve, one of humanity’s most exuberant specimens, ate his dessert in brooding, never-before-observed silence.

Rest in peace, my friend.

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Max Born and Olivia Newton-John. Photos in the public domain at Wikimedia Commons.

For a Saner World, Data, Theory, and Humility

Segments of this piece were extracted from my article, “More Theory, More Data, Less Polarization,” published April 26, 2022, by InsideSources.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, “discussion” has often taken the form of blind assertion-cum-vilification. Assertions concerning masks, lockdowns, vaccines, social distancing have often taken one of two forms, which we can call “data-without-theory” and “theory-without-data.” Someone—scientist or layperson—looks into his or her inner soul and deduces what ought to be true, and then lambasts any and all who question his or her logic. Or, someone—scientist or layperson—looks at a set of data and divines what they perceive to be self-evident patterns—and then lambasts any and all who question said divination. This is not a new problem, though social media and hysterical news programming have likely augmented the consequences.

Max Born, who won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics, argued that both data-without-theory and theory-without-data were harmful to the pursuit of scientific knowledge. My father, a humble soldier and merchant, loved physics and had a splendid collection of popular works by Max Born, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, Willy Ley, Martin Gardner, Stephen Hawking, and others. One of his favorites was Born’s “Experiment & Theory in Physics,” an expanded version of a 1943 lecture delivered in wartime England. A German-Jewish refugee, Born noted that physics had always been divided between those who favored experimental data over introspective theory and those who preferred theory over data. But in the polarized era leading up to World War II, he said, this division had grown more extreme and vitriolic.

In Germany, Born said, extreme experimentalists had “gone so far as to reject theory altogether as an invention of the Jews.” These physicists looked only at data and ignored theoretical insights and interpretations. In the opposite direction, he said, a similarly radical school of thought (though not driven by racism) had lionized deductive theory and rejected experiments and data as unnecessary. 

Born argued that reliance upon observation alone or introspection alone compromised the validity of scientific findings. Proper methods, he argued, require an iteration of the two modes of exploration—data acting as a check on theory without proper backing and theory acting as a check on incorrect, misunderstood or conflicting data.

Forty years ago, I assigned Born’s little book to my economics students at Hunter College to give them two insights. First, that the flaws in reasoning that make economics (and other social sciences) seem unscientific to outsiders are also present in physics—the hardest of the hard sciences. Second, that physicists, like economists, often disagree over scientific questions for reasons that have nothing to do with science —including prejudice and stubbornness. The production of knowledge is always a human endeavor, subject to every human fallibility.

On any COVID question imaginable, some on both sides have unjustifiably leapt to conclusions on the basis of introspection or statistics—and vilified any who dared to disagree. Often, the end purpose or end result has been to score cheap political hot takes. (To repeat, such behavior has been evident on both sides of every COVID question.) In the near-future, I’ll explore this recent history in greater depth. In 2021, I wrote about one part of the problem in “Conservatives and Public Health: A Warm Welcome Into a Cold Climate”—particularly in the section titled “What We’ve Got Here Is Failure to Communicate.”

Finally, you may be wondering why this article begins with a photo of the late Australian singer, Olivia Newton-John. The reason lies in a fun bit of trivia—Newton-John was Max Born’s granddaughter. And more pragmatically, I felt certain that some people would read this piece in its entirety specifically because they were wondering, “Why the hell is an article on COVID and epistemology topped off by a photo of Olivia Newton-John?”

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A Year of War / Год войны / Рік війни

Above is a hauntingly powerful 12-minute video of a peaceful candlelight vigil by Ukrainian activists outside the Russian Embassy in Washington, DC. The narrator is my good friend and neighbor, Luda Huntsman. The vigil was held on the first anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Brookings Institution Senior Fellow

Benjamin Wittes

 organized the event, using lasers to project words and symbols of defiance on the façade of the embassy. The text is from an essay by Katya Savchenko—a diarist whose writings describe life under the occupation of Bucha. The Embassy apparently posted the cryptic “Z” and “V” propaganda symbols on the wall in a failed attempt to drown out the laser inscriptions. 

Through a quirk of circumstances (after losing cattle to a blight, some said), my grandfather, Abraham Graboyes, emigrated from Kishinev, Bessarabia (Chișinău, Moldova today) to Philadelphia around 1890. Our family’s home was perhaps 20 miles from what is now Ukraine. Other ancestors came from Latvia and Lithuania. As I watch contemporary events unfold, I am ever-mindful that, had family history taken a slightly different turn, some version of me might now be huddled in a bunker, trembling at the approach of Putin’s onslaught.

Rehoboth Pastorale

In the past two years, Rehoboth Beach, Delaware has become something of a family gathering-spot. Founded as a Methodist religious retreat in the 19th century, today it looks more like a New England seaside village than what one normally expects from a mid-Atlantic beach resort. Inspired by its peaceful majesty, I composed a suite of eight songs that speak of the town and its region and history. The video provides explanatory notes on the music, the terrain, and the history—plus eight beautiful paintings my wife did of Rehoboth and its environs.

As the video explains, the first piece takes its name from a Brazilian poem, later set to music by Heitor Villa-Lobos. Other titles come from Psalms, a nature preserve set aside by William Penn, the 19th century Chautauqua movement, a medieval art form, a poem by Heinrich Heine, inspirational words from the pastor who founded Rehoboth, and the emotions we feel when we are far from the sea.

Robert F. Graboyes publishes Bastiat’s Window, a Substack journal of economics, science, and culture—with an emphasis on healthcare. He is a health economist, journalist, and musician in Alexandria, Virginia, and holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. In 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism. His music compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos.